New fangled recommendations ?

Our last Vhs player has finally given up thr ghost......

What are peoples thoughts on the new hard drive recorders, and or recordable DVD players .....

 

get a toshiba dr-1 150 ish quid from richers or e-bay and will do dvd-ram which gives you all the chasing playback / pause live tv stuff you could want and pal progressive via component outs etc.
cheers


julian

 

sky+ and a dvdr should you feel the need for archiving.

 

If you don't want to pay for subscription TV and are happy with Freeview then the Thomson DHD4000 is a nifty dual-digital tuner hard disk recorder. Note that it doesn't have a card slot though so you can't upgrade to pay-TV later. It will record two programmes whilst playing back an earlier recording though. Very neat.

 

top up tv enabled pvrs will be released shortly (i knows these things )

 

Pete, I have the Thompsons HD receiver/recorder too, which I rate very highly for all the reasons TB states, I get all the extra chanels and can pause/rewind live TV.

If you are the sort that tapes things to keep its no good you'd run out of HD space. But if like me its just to watch at a later stage is great. Pic qty is fantastic over analogue and recorings lose no quality.

Dixons do a humax one thats cheaper and has a bigger HD.

You can also use it as a digital radio and play it through your Quad cdp99

 

I have the Humax Freeview / hard drive recorder - I am very impressed with it (cost £130 I think), however it only has one tuner i.e. you can't watch one thing and record another.

 

I've got a Humax too and am very happy with it:



http://www.247electrical.co.uk/epag...N/Product/HUMPVR8000T80?STS=247&source=KELKOO

For its price it's great. You can pay more to get more recording space (or stick a bigger hard drive in the Humax), and a second decoder would be nice so you could watch one channel whilst recording another.

 

sony hxd710 is the one to beat
160 gig hard drive
+ dvd burner (not dvd ram i think)
+ freeview tuner
all in one box

 

I have the Humax too, excellent value for money and performance both visually and sonically will not disappoint. Not got around to getting a DVD recorder yet, but I will need to do that.

Funny you mention your VCR giving up the ghost, I have a Samsung S-7000 VCR which was their top of the line digital Worldwide decoder player. You can play and record in any of the Worlds video formats and the quality has to be up there with some of the best VCR's I have seen for picture.

However, just lately it's developed a picture noise problem. It appears as though the videos need to be correctly tracked but no matter how you adjust the tracking it does not fix the problem (videos play fine on other players).

Have cleaned the heads etc with no difference. It developed a similar problem when I lived in the USA so had it serviced and repaired but looks like it will need doing again. Don't want to let it go as it is worth keeping purely just for replay. PLus I loved the champaign gold finish and front fold down panel design too

 

Thanks for the info.................

should have said we have cable.....so tuner or freeview type kit will be superflous. I don't do home thearter or multi chanel either. But the cable box does play through the HiFi.

I'm intrested in the one box hd and recordable dvd's ......does that effect people thoughts.

 

panasonic eh50, or the sony hxd510
both 80gig hard drives and dvd burners.
but really consider the sony 710 - even though you're duplicating on the freeview, the sony gives u one-box recording, u dont have to set timer on 2 boxes, plus the electronic programme guide is a winner.
full retail on the 710 is £500 i think
also not quite available, next month ?
http://www.avland.co.uk/sony/rdrhxd710/rdrhxd710.htm

 

if you have cable ntl or telewest will be releasing a sky+ type offering - but it will be nearer the end of the year for availability.

 

If I could be permitted to move slightly off topic, there are a couple of points arising from the above quote that I'd like to pick your collective minds on.

I've heard it said that a Freeview tuner is capable of producing better quality radio than a pukka digital tuner. Agree/disagree?

In such a set-up, what are the limitations on length of digital interconnect between tuner and dac?

 

No thoughts on this?

 

There have been threads that have covered this before.

IIRC satellite radio broadcasts are not as compressed as dab and so are therefore possibly better quality. Not sure of dab tuners vs freeview. Also not sure that the current state of affairs is likely to remain unchanged, there have been several articles around where people have been complaining about the low quality of some dab broadcasts, and encouragement for standards to be set to guarantee quality on all sources.

There seems to be a lot of info and articles on this site, if you can be arsed to trawl through them....

http://www.digitalradiotech.co.uk/

 

Get a combined dvd and hard drive Pete then thats only one box to bother with. You can even get a triple player combining those two plus a VHS recorder for dubbing your old VHS tapes to dvd or hard drive. I haven't had much luck with Philips stuff so i myself keep away. Jimbo.

 

Ok.... a year on the quad 99 cdp [now mkII] takes both dab and digital from the cable box .....if the sources are switched its clear that the dab tuner has the better sound but its only a gnats ..if of course you use the tv to do the radio sound this is inferior.

As to the lengths of digital IC I've seen the maths ...but could not repeat it that a max legth of a digital conductor is about 300m for the typical output and cable. Thats not to say there are not issues with the type of cable your using and of course the equipment. I've not had a problem with any of my home brew digital cables .........of 50cm ........1500cm with or without pulse transformer.

 

Refering to the origional thread subject, what have you ended up with Pete?

I use a Humax PVR which I have found to be exellent. I aslo ahve a Humax DVD recorder which is OK but takes too long to set up each time. Also archiving has to be done in real time........which means it doesn't get done.

Ideally I would use a combined freeview/HDD/DVD recorder (I think Sony have had one available for 6 months or so) which might make archiving a bit less hassle. Has any one any experince of these?

 

I got a toshiba dvd recorder +80gb hdd